October 17, 2012

Germany is awash in another wave of discussions about plagiarism. This
time it is the Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan. The
story about plagiarism in her dissertation broke in May, and the
University of Düsseldorf has been examining the case since. Today,
October 17, the committee is meeting to decide on the results, but the
documentation that they prepared was leaked to the press this past
weekend, and the press has been in a frenzy.

And I have laryngitis and can't talk. I have journalists pleading with
me to explain how the "magic" VroniPlag Wiki software works. The problem
is, there is no magic software. The method used to find plagiarism in
dissertations (or any other written work) is called "research". Just
normal research.

But since so many people need to know how this is done, here's a crib sheet with 10 easy steps:

Obtain the thesis. If you are just trying to find the dissertation of a particular person who did their doctoral work in Germany, give the German National Library
a try. Type in the name and see what it comes up with. Then use the
catalog of your local library (often called an OPAC, online public
access catalog) or a union catalog to try and locate a copy. Most German
states have a union catalog, in Berlin it is the KOBV.
If there is none in your locality, you can obtain a library card and
then have the thesis sent to you using inter-library loan.

Read the thesis. There is no royal road. The so-called
plagiarism detection software can turn up the odd reference, but only if
the sources are online. The best bet is to start reading it, and look
for shifts in writing style, or places where the writing turns
Spiegel-esque, or for sudden useless details, or misspellings, or just
wrong content.

Google. I've given up on other search machines. Just belly up
to the search bar and type in three to five words from a sentence or
paragraph and see what turns up. If you get a lead through Google Books,
use step 1 to obtain a copy of the book. If you get lucky and the first
paragraph is taken from the FAZ or the NZZ -- paydirt! Don't just try
one paragraph, take a few from different parts of the book.

Follow the footnotes. University teachers do this when
teaching their students how to footnote, and it scares the daylights out
of students when they see that the professor found out that they were
just making up the footnotes. Does the reference exist? Is the thing
being said found on that page? Is the whole paragraph taken from the
reference with the quotation marks "forgotten"? Does the chapter in the
dissertation continue on after the footnote without a further reference?
Is this paragraph perhaps just a translation of the reference?

Browse the bibliography. What is the most recent source used?
Is it five years older than the dissertation? In some fields, this
would sound an alarm. Is there some strange or obscure literature
listed? Obtain it! Do you need journal articles? Germany had a wonderful
listing of the holdings of all libraries nationwide, the Zeitschriftendatenbank.
It will tell you where they can be found, and many can even be
delivered to your email account as a pdf for a few Euros. Many libraries
also subscribe to digital libraries that can be used when sitting at
the library. A walk would do you good, anyway, so get over there and
have a look.

Digitize. If you have already found a source plagiarized in a
dissertation, the chance is that there is more. Have a good look at
each, and now digitize the relevant portions. Use a book scanner in the
library to get a high-quality scan of the pages as a PDF. You lay the
book flat under the camera, press a button, turn the page, press a
button, until you are done. Experienced scanners can do over 100 pages
per hour. Now use an optical character recognition (OCR) software on the
PDF. There are free ones like Google's Tesseract or professional versions such as the one built into Adobe's Acrobat or OmniPage or Abbyy Fine Reader.

Compare. This is one if the few software systems the VroniPlag Wiki people use. It is a text comparison tool that is based on the free algorithm of Dick Grune.
The tool marks identical passages in two documents that it is
comparing. Put the dissertation in one side, the source in the other,
and press "Texte vergleichen!". Don't forget to make a screen shot if
the results turn out colorful.

Document. If you find anything, document it exactly. Page and
line numbers from the dissertation, URL or page and line numbers from
the source, and a copy of each. A two-column side-by-side has proved
easy to understand when showing the results to others.

Need help? If you have already found some nasty text parallels, drop in at the VroniPlag Wiki chat or use the drop
if you want to be discreet. You might be able to interest someone in
working on the case. But remember, they are all volunteers. Or you can
continue on yourself, and then inform the ombud for good scientific
practice at the university in question.

Publish. If you feel that it is necessary to publish your results, you can either choose a wiki, such as the GuttenPlag Wiki or the VroniPlag Wiki, which makes it easier for others to help you with the documentation, or you can publish on a blog, like the SchavanPlag
blog, which gives you complete control of what is published. Or you can
print up a book, like Marion Soreth did in 1990 when she documented the dissertation of her colleague Elisabeth Ströker.

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SCIENTIST 10 COMMANDMENTS

ARE YOU AN HONEST SCIENTIST?

Truthfulness in science should be an iron law, not
a vague aspiration.:."Anyone who has been a scientist for more than a couple of decades will realize that there has been a progressive and pervasive decline in the honesty of
scientific communications. Yet real science simply must be an arena where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being science and becomes
something else:Zombie science."



STOP THE NUMBERS GAME

"As a senior researcher, I am saddened to see funding agencies, department heads, deans, and promotion committees encouraging younger researchers to do shallow research. As a reader of what should be serious scientific journals, I am annoyed to see the computer science literature being polluted by more and more papers of less and less scientific value. As one who has often served as an editor or referee, I am offended by discussions that imply that the journal is there to serve the authors rather than the readers. Other readers of scientific journals should be similarly outraged and demand change." >>>

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"Almost every day, the media features news on academic corruption. Plagiarism, bogus degrees, degree mills, accreditation mills, research misconduct, and administrative misbehavior are among the most frequent topics, but academic corruption usually goes unnoticed in the public mainstream; rarely does it make the front page. However, this trend is already changing and academic corruption is captivating the attention of journalists and readers, and sometimes shocking the public.">>>

BARRIER TO THRIVING PLAGIARISM

"Plagiarism is a phenomenon that existed in the past, exists today and will exist in the future. Slovakia with its population of 5.4 million is confronted with theses and dissertation plagiarism like other countries. The rapid growth in the number of higher education institutions and students, the ICT and internet penetration growth plus low copyright and intellectual property rights awareness in our country contributed to the expansion of plagiarism - an unwanted kind of „creativity“. And there was an inherent lack of systemic action, which would be a barrier for its future growth." - Július Kravjar